Han Yong-un (1879 - 1944)

Han Yong-un was born in Hongsong, South Chungchong Province, in 1879. Having studied classical Chinese in his native village, he began at the age of twenty to study Buddhist scriptures at a Buddhist monastery in Mt. Sorak and became a Buddhist monk in 1905. In 1908, he traveled in Japan, visiting Kyoto and Tokyo. After the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, he played a leading role in resisting Japan’s policies toward Korean Buddhism and the Korean people at large. He even lived for a while in exile in Manchuria. In the 1919 Korean Independence Movement, he was one of the most active among the thirty-three signers of the Declaration of Independence and had to spend three years in prison. It was presumably during this period of imprisonment that he began to write modern-style poems in Korean in response to the poems of Tagore. These "modern" poems, distinguished from both his sijopoems and his poems in Chinese, were collected in a volume, The Silence of Love, which was first published in 1926. A great Korean Buddhist, patriot and poet, he died in Seoul in 1944.